Lotus Culinary Travel is a U.S.-based provider of culinary immersions in Asia.

We team with both top chef-instructors and traditional home cooks to design classes and experiences tailored specifically for travelers. We combine that with our local knowledge of the city's most authentic and enticing restaurants and relationships with chefs and farmers to create culinary immersions available nowhere else.

Taylor Holliday
Founder and President
Taylor became an expert on culinary travel while eating and cooking her way around the world and writing about it as frequent contributor to The New York Times. Culinary trips to Vietnam in 2005 and China in 2007 in which she had the privilege of spending time in kitchens great and small convinced her that there is no better way to experience a culture than through its cuisine. She founded Lotus Culinary Travel in 2007 in order to share her culinary discoveries and connections with other food-obsessed travelers. Previously Taylor spent a decade as an arts, culture and food editor at The Wall Street Journal in New York City. Prior to that she immersed herself in the cuisines of Europe while living in London, Paris and Basel. She holds a masters degree in international affairs from Columbia University in New York, is a member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and spends several months of the year seeking out authentic and enlightening food experiences in Asia with her local managers and partners.

Lotus Culinary in Sichuan:

Rose Nickel
Sichuan Manager
Rose is a Chengdu native and a U.S. citizen, a business consultant, artist and master of hospitality. After many years in California, where she earned her masters degree in teaching English as a foreign language, she returned to her hometown in 2000 to work as a commercial representative for the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu. In that capacity she planned for and hosted delegations of business travelers from the U.S., among other responsibilities. In 2007 she served as secretary general of the American Chamber of Commerce in Sichuan. Now the proprietor of a lovely mountain resort outside Chengdu, she also acts as the in-country manager for Lotus Culinary Travel in Sichuan.

Sichuan Chef-Instructor

Qingqing is our brilliant and charming chef-instructor at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine. The rare English-speaking teacher, his knowledge of and enthusiasm for the cuisine is clear and infectious. An instructor since 2001, he teaches Chinese cuisine, hotel management and food materials and storage at the institute while also managing the school's onsite restaurants, which feed 7,000 people a day. A Han Chinese who grew up in Xinjiang province, in China's Muslim northwest, he specializes in both traditional Sichuan and Uighur cuisines. Since graduating from the institute himself, he has studied and participated in chef exchanges in France and Switzerland.

Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine
This culinary university is one of the most respected professional cooking schools in China, training the country’s and the world’s greatest Sichuan chefs as well as visitors from abroad, including students from the Culinary Institute of America and top French culinary academies. While occasionally welcoming travelers in the past, the Higher Institute of Cuisine has designed a demonstration and hands-on cooking class specifically and exclusively for Lotus Culinary’s English-speaking travelers.

Museum of Sichuan Cuisine
One of the first privately owned museums in China, the Museum of Sichuan Cuisine was founded in 2007 to pay elegant homage to the history of Sichuan food. It holds a private collection of local cooking equipment and tableware that spans 2,000 years. Besides the exhibition galleries, the beautiful and expansive museum campus also features a tea house, a temple to the Kitchen God, several grand banquet rooms and a state-of-the-art demonstration kitchen. In an exclusive arrangement with Lotus Culinary Travel, the museum’s Cuisine Masters will lead guests in preparing classic Sichuan dishes.

Golden Water

Our exclusive mountain retreat was built as a summer home by Rose and her husband and eventually grew to accommodate 30-plus friends. At the end of a one-lane road near the top of a moutain thick with palms and pines, the property has a clear mountain stream running through it, rustic bamboo structures influenced by both Chinese and African design and a lovely restaurant and teahouse that does double duty as our cooking school. Nearby are Daoist temples both new and ancient as well as farms and art-and-antiques-filled villages.